After months of beta testing, DuckDuckGo’s AI integrations are going live for everyone and getting some upgrades at the same time: They’re free to use (with certain limits), and stay in line with DuckDuckGo’s commitment to user privacy (you don’t have to create an account to use them, and your searches aren’t tracked).

As with Google, Bing, ChatGPT, and others, you can now get AI answers to your web searches at DuckDuckGo. They appear in a small box with an Assist label attached, but they aren’t as prominent and don’t show up as often as they do on Google or Bing—DuckDuckGo is aiming for a less-is-more approach to the feature.

You can decide how much AI you see.
Credit: Lifehacker

“We’re not making AI features just for the sake of making AI features,” writes DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg. “They have to be actually useful in everyday use, starting with helping people get faster, high-quality answers to their questions.”

With this in mind, you can tune down the amount of AI you see—head to the DuckDuckGo settings page, and under AI Features, there’s a drop-down menu that lets you choose between Never, On-demand, Sometimes, and Often. If you choose either of the latter two, the search engine uses its best judgment as to which queries might benefit from AI answers and which won’t.

The second part of DuckDuckGo’s AI offering is the Duck.ai chatbot. You can ask follow-up questions of the bot whenever you see an AI Assist response in search results, and you can also access it via its own web portal: You’ve got access to multiple AI models here, including GPT-4o mini, Llama 3.3, and Claude 3 Haiku.

How the AI Assist box looks at the top of results.
Credit: Lifehacker

Chats are never saved on DuckDuckGo servers, or used to train AI models, and you can wipe all chats from the record using the flame icon in the toolbar on the right. Ideally, DuckDuckGo wants you to use a combination of web search, AI Assist, and AI chat to help you get the answers you’re looking for.

If you’re wondering how all of this stays free without any tracking, DuckDuckGo makes its money from advertising—it’s just that the ads aren’t as targeted as they are on Google, because DuckDuckGo doesn’t know anywhere near as much about you. The company is also exploring the idea of a paid plan for access to more advanced AI models and for extra chats with AI (there’s already a $10-per-month pro-level subscription, which includes a VPN and some other extras).

Testing out the DuckDuckGo AI

I spent some time playing around with the new AI features, and on the whole they follow the general DuckDuckGo ethos: Everything is simple, straightforward to use, cleanly presented, and accessible without having to jump through multiple hoops just to get started with these tools.

With an AI Assist level of Sometimes, DuckDuckGo usually makes the right call about whether or not AI should get involved. The reason why these search engines are rushing to implement AI is that queries like “how does DNA work?” or “how do I fix a PC that won’t boot?” are often better answered by a bot than the traditional list of links—especially if you can ask follow-up questions for clarification.

You can quickly get to Duck.ai from the search results.
Credit: Lifehacker

For more traditional searches, like “Eiffel Tower” or “intermittent fasting,” DuckDuckGo sticks to the standard approach (AI models have never been to France, or tried dieting). If you’re looking for an AI response and one doesn’t appear, you can click the Assist button to generate it.

AI companies are often vague and dismissive when it comes to accuracy, so it’s good to see DuckDuckGo addressing the issue: The AI Assist answers are “as reliable as the sources from which they are drawn,” with measures in place to avoid spammy or satirical sites, and user feedback adding an extra level of verification. The web sources for AI answers are always clearly displayed, so you can click through to see the actual websites.

All of the AI answers I received seemed fully accurate: I ran some tests with tech questions; the AI Assist tool picked some well-respected online publications to pull information from, and presented it accurately. There is the question of where we get to when AI is answering everything, and humans are no longer bothering to put enough information online for AI to scrape, but that’s a topic for another day.

You can ask follow-up questions within the search results themselves.
Credit: Lifehacker

I found the Duck.ai chatbot didn’t appear as often as I would’ve liked, to ask follow-up questions. It’s easy enough to switch to the chatbot manually, but then you find yourself bumping up against the knowledge cut-off points of these various models—they rely on historical training data rather than the latest information online. More work needs to be done on integrating live web search with AI here.

On the whole, DuckDuckGo seems to have the balance right, if you want to avoid AI overload: The AI Assist feature doesn’t always appear, and doesn’t dominate the search results when it does show up. Answers are brief and accurate, and while there’s a lot of competition out there, the privacy-first approach is reassuring.

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